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a clerk in government service, and through his mother's family he had connections with both the army
and the navy. But from the age of nine onwards he was brought up in London in commercial
surroundings, and generally in an atmosphere of struggling poverty. Mentally he belongs to the small
urban bourgeoisie, and he happens to be an exceptionally fine specimen of this class, with all the
"points," as it were, very highly developed. That is partly what makes him so interesting. If one wants
a modern equivalent, the nearest would be H. G. Wells, who has had a rather similar history and who
obviously owes something to Dickens as a novelist. Arnold Bennett was essentially of the same type,
but, unlike the other two, he was a midlander, with an industrial and Nonconformist rather than
commercial and Anglican background.
The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited
outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is either
laughable or slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or the soil; on the other,
no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied Wells's novels in detail will have
noticed that though he hates the aristocrat like poison, he has no particular objection to the plutocrat,
and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His most-hated types, the people he believes to be responsible
for all human ills, are kings, landowners, priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants. At first
sight a list beginning with kings and ending with peasants looks like a mere omnium gatherum, but in
reality all these people have a common factor. All of them are archaic types, people who are
governed by tradition and whose eyes are turned towards the past—the opposite, therefore, of the
rising bourgeois who has put his money on the future and sees the past simply as a dead hand.
Actually, although Dickens lived in a period when the bourgeoisie was really a rising
class, he displays this characteristic less strongly than Wells. He is almost unconscious of the future
and has a rather sloppy love of the picturesque (the "quaint old church," etc.). Nevertheless his list of
most-hated types is like enough to Wells's for the similarity to be striking. He is vaguely on the side of
the working class—has a sort of generalised sympathy with them because they are oppressed—but he
does not in reality know much about them; they come into his books chiefly as servants, and comic
servants at that. At the other end of the scale he loathes the aristocrat and—going one better than
Wells in this—loathes the big bourgeois as well. His real sympathies are bounded by Mr. Pickwick
on the upper side and Mr. Barkis on the lower. But the term "aristocrat," for the type Dickens hates, is
vague and needs defining.
Actually Dickens's target is not so much the great aristocracy, who hardly enter into his
books, as their petty offshoots, the cadging dowagers who live up mews in Mayfair, and the
bureaucrats and professional soldiers. All through his books there are countless hostile sketches of
these people, and hardly any that are friendly. There are practically no friendly pictures of the
landowning class, for instance. One might make a doubtful exception of Sir Leicester Dedlock;
otherwise there is only Mr. Wardle (who is a stock figure—the "good old squire") and Haredale in
Barnaby Rudge, who has Dickens's sympathy because he is a persecuted Catholic. There are no
friendly pictures of soldiers (i.e. officers), and none at all of naval men. As for his bureaucrats,
judges and magistrates, most of them would feel quite at home in the Circumlocution Office. The only
officials whom Dickens handles with any kind of friendliness are, significantly enough, policemen.
Dickens's attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is part of the English